NA'AMA, Israeli-Occupied West Bank -- Two neighboring farming communities -- this flourishing Jewish settlement and the withering Arab village of al Auja about a mile away -- illustrate a fundamental source of the Middle East conflict.
It is water. One has enough. The other doesn't. In a region likely to go dry within 10 years, an equitable way to share the water is crucial to the Middle East peace process now under way.
For the Jewish settlers who adjust to the isolation and heat, Na'ama's well-watered fields of vegetables are a testament to hard work and proof that the desert can be made to bloom.
For the Palestinians of the village of al Auja, a mile to the north, Na'ama's greenness explains the browning of the local banana groves and the drying up of an ancient spring -- a testament to the diversion of al Auja's water.
Water will forever link Israelis and Palestinians. The two peoples draw supplies from the same underground source, the large aquifer that underlies the hills of the West Bank and parts of Israel.
Underground water flowing from the central hills toward the Mediterranean has been a major source of drinking water for Israelis since the establishment of the state in 1948. Underground water flowing from the same hills toward the Jordan River is the supply for West Bank Palestinians.
Conditions at Na'ama and al Auja show why each side has reason to consider the water its own, and why no one willingly surrenders a drop.
Na'ama belongs to a string of settlements established by Israel in the part of the Jordan River valley it captured during the 1967 Six Day War, the event that redrew the area's contested borders and reshuffled control of water supplies.
Officials authorizing settlements in the 1970s and early '80s drew their inspiration from the Zionist pioneers of the 1920s and '30s. In both eras, establishing communities of farmers was the easiest way to hold on to land that was suitable for little else.
Farms could be built faster than cities, and fewer people were needed for the projects to take root.
"Agriculture in Israel allowed people to live on the borders -- in the Golan Heights, in the Jordan Valley," explains Shlomo Reizman, head of Israel's Farmers' Federation. "You couldn't send industry there. You couldn't send tourists. Agriculture let people stay."
Na'ama is the newest of the settlements in the southern valley. A small number of young couples, some of whom had never farmed, worked elsewhere in the valley to gain experience and then, in 1980, moved to the site chosen for them.
Even now, the general area looks like utterly worthless desert. Na'ama is a small cluster of flat-roofed houses built on a vast plain of coarse white sand where temperatures in summer regularly top 110 degrees. It is safe to assume that other than nomads who might have made a brief stop between oases, the 19 families of Na'ama are the first to make use of the land in centuries.
Their patch of desert, thanks to special greenhouses and advanced irrigation techniques, produces eggplants, onions, tomatoes, tarragon, grapes, green peppers, flowers for export to Europe, corn, parsely, date palms and dill.
That's all thanks to a fairly bountiful supply of water. Israel's national water company delivers it from three deep wells, two located a few miles to the north, one to the south.
People in al Auja date the worsening of their own problems to the construction of the wells and the settlements they supply.
Capital of bananas
Al Auja used to fancy itself as the capital of bananas. However poor the village looked, bananas were the most profitable crop in the valley and could make a person rich. Al Auja was a sandy green smudge in the
desert, and usually profitable. People worked in their own small groves, or in the groves of landowners who lived elsewhere to escape the summer heat and the year-round mosquitoes.
All it took was water. Banana trees are notoriously thirsty, and each acre of them in an al Auja summer requires 32 cubic meters of water a day. (A cubic meter contains 262 gallons.)
Al Auja flourished because of a freshwater spring that emerges in a palm grove in steep hills to the west. It has been a reliable water source for at least 2,000 years, since the Romans of Biblical times took the trouble to construct more than 10 miles of aqueducts to reach it.
Villagers say that the first time in recent generations the spring went dry was in 1962, a drought year. When winter rains began soaking the hills of the West Bank, the flow of water returned to normal. In 1979 it went dry again. Villagers say that now it has failed every summer since 1986 -- after the deep wells drilled by Israel's water company began supplying the new settlements.
"We can't give up the fields because this is the only life we know," said Ibrahim Naji, who has tried to organize fellow villagers to lobby for permission to drill a municipal well. "The farmers plant every year when the water comes, and they don't harvest anything because the water dries up."
A single aquifer
Most of the water consumed in the West Bank comes from a single aquifer. It underlies the spine of mountains and hills running most of the length of the West Bank, and part of central Israel. Much of the drinking water delivered to Jerusalem comes from the same underground source tapped by the wells supplying Na'ama and feeding the al Auja spring.
But Israelis and Palestinians consume at sharply different rates. If all uses are counted, including agriculture, Israelis consume about 375 cubic meters of water per person each year. For Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, consumption per person averages about 120 cubic meters a year.
Figures from only the West Bank show a much larger gap. According to figures compiled by Palestinians, intensive irrigation raises the annual water consumption among Jewish settlers to 975 cubic meters a person. They say the figure for West Bank Palestinians is 140 cubic meters.
Most of the difference comes from Israel drilling more and deeper wellsfor its own use while granting few permits to Palestinians. Several studies describe instances in which authorities denied permission to increase water supplies for Palestinian communities while water projects to benefit Israel or Jewish settlements were approved.
A government ombudsman reported in 1987 that the national water company seized land near the West Bank city of Nablus without getting permission from the owners, drilled a well and laid pipes to carry the water to a settlement. Compensation to the owners was only offered later.
On another occasion, authorities denied the Nablus municipality permission to increase the flow from city-owned wells. To avoid shortages, the city resorted to purchasing water from nearby settlements. Studies have found that Palestinians sometimes were charged substantially higher prices than the settlers.
There may be no single cause for the spring in al Auja going dry more often these days and for increasingly longer periods of time.
One factor probably is the three-year drought that has been ended by this winter's unusually heavy rains. Another may be the series of wells drilled to supply the settlements. The pull exerted by the pumps changes the flow of underground water, and could divert water that would otherwise emerge from the spring.
Al Auja's water shortage might be lessened if the community could drill a well for its own use, or deepen any of the existing wells in the area. Five local farmers continue to grow bananas, and they are the five with private wells. Israeli occupation authorities have set limits on how much can be pumped from each of the wells, and they meter the flow.
As for a new well, residents say they have been seeking permission since 1986 without having their application approved.
Israelis and Palestinians each have reason to fear the thirst of the other. They only have to look at conditions in the Gaza Strip to see thedisastrous consequences for the entire region when too much is pumped from an aquifer.
Lesson from Gaza Strip
Gaza is a water conservationist's "worst case," because its underground water supplies have been ruined, perhaps irreparably.
Drinking water for Gaza's 800,000 Palestinians used to come from wells connected to an aquifer underlying the area along the Mediterranean Sea. Beginning in the 1950s, more water was pumped each year from the aquifer than rainfall could replace, and its level began to fall.
By the mid-1980s, it had fallen close enough to sea level to allow salt water to seep in. Parts of the aquifer, including most of the wells in Gaza, became too salty to drink. Most of Gaza's drinking water now must be pumped from Israel.
Both Israelis and Palestinians worry that a similar disaster could occur in the aquifer underlying the West Bank and Israel's hills, unless the parties agree on how the resource should be shared.
Without some agreement, they can count on water shortages -- and the prospect of armed clashes to secure larger supplies.
Palestinians fear Israelis will drill more and deeper wells. Israelis fear that, as part of a peace settlement, Palestinians will claim all waters underneath the territory they control. Each fears going thirsty because of the thirst of the other.